1. Field
Example embodiments relate to sensors for detecting outside stimulations, and more particularly, to cognitive sensors, and/or methods of operating the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Sensors are typically categorized in five classes (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) of sensors, biosensors for sensing blood sugar, blood pressure, body fat, cholesterol, etc., and environmental sensors for sensing various chemical substances.
Such a sensor may be embodied as a chip including a sensor unit for converting outside stimulations into electric signals, a signal processing circuit for processing electric signals converted by the sensor unit, and an input/output (I/O) circuit. For example, a CMOS image sensor may be a semiconductor chip including a pixel array in which photoelectric conversion units are 2-dimensionally arranged, a control unit for controlling the pixel array, a readout circuit for reading out pixel signals output from the pixel array, and an image signal processing unit for processing the pixel signals read out by the readout circuit into an image.
Meanwhile, an information processing system that processes sensed data obtained via a sensor typically uses artificial intelligence (AI) for extracting relevant information from the sensed data. For example, a method of extracting human faces from a photographic image including both humans and landscapes by using an AI technology has been suggested, and such a method is applied to a focusing algorithm for picking up portrait images in a camera.
When an amount of signal data increases, a sensor in the related art typically exhibits large power consumption and slow processing speed for processing signals. For example, in the case of an image sensor, as the number of pixel increases, the image sensor exhibits large power consumption and slow processing speed for processing an image. Furthermore, an information processing apparatus in the related art receives all of the sensed data sensed by a sensor and processes the sensed data. Therefore, as the number of sensing elements of a sensor increases, an amount of raw data transmitted from the sensor increases. As a result, a bottleneck phenomenon may take place during data transmission from the sensor to the information processing apparatus, and the information processing apparatus also typically exhibits large power consumption and slow processing speed for processing signals.